Wednesday, November 30, 2011

2011-11-30 "Homeless families in S.F. seek public housing; Supporters demand the city open up vacant public housing units to them" by Jill Tucker from "San Francisco Chronicle"
[http://articles.sfgate.com/2011-11-30/news/30461486_1_homeless-families-overnight-shelters-jennifer-friedenbach]
Nearly 2,200 of San Francisco's public school students are homeless, enough to fill five or six elementary schools or an entire high school.That's nearly 400 more homeless schoolchildren than a year ago.The spike reflects an alarming increase in families across the city sleeping in cars, shelters, cramped single-occupancy hotel rooms or a series of couches or floors. Some are occasionally on the streets.As of late last week, 267 families - a record number - were on the waiting list for one of 59 rooms in San Francisco's three city-funded shelters that allow families to stay for months at a time. That's triple the number of previous years.On Tuesday, several of those homeless families gathered on the steps of City Hall to demand a meeting with Mayor Ed Lee. They want him to consider opening up vacant public housing units to meet the demand.
"From our perspective, we are facing a crisis of homelessness of families in San Francisco," said Jennifer Friedenbach, executive director of the Coalition on Homelessness.As things stand, those 267 families will have to wait for the rooms for at least seven months, and even then they would get to stay just three to six months, said Elizabeth Ancker, assistant program director for Compass Connecting Point, which helps manage shelter placement.

Overnight shelters -As a last resort for families, overnight shelters are filling up nightly, Ancker said.Yet there are hundreds of vacant public housing units that could be opened up, Friedenbach said Tuesday on the steps of City Hall."Those units are sitting empty while families are suffering," she said.City officials downplayed the situation, noting that none of the families on the shelter wait list are out on the streets.The Bethel African Methodist Church, for example, opens up gymnasium floor space for up to 50 families during the winter. About 30 families are currently taking advantage of that, said Trent Rhorer, director of the city's Human Services Agency."Seeing an increased need for economic support and shelter among families who are currently residing in housing is certainly troubling," Rhorer said. "But I wouldn't call it an emergency or crisis situation that would demand opening a new shelter."If we had hundreds of families sleeping on the street and exposed to the elements, yeah, that's a crisis."

Showing the strain -
Celia Colon, 24, a single mother, has been homeless for a year and is thankful she never had to sleep on the street. She and her two daughters, ages 5 years and 10 months, instead bounced from one overnight shelter to another in Oakland and San FranciscoLast week, they finally landed a room at the city's Compass Family Shelter.Still, the wear and tear on her daughter Sofia Ayala, a kindergartner on scholarship at Holy Family Day Home, is evident.
She struggles with attention issues and occasionally screams in class. Sofia and her mom get therapy and other support to address the stress caused by their situation, said Colon."Sometimes (Sofia) says, 'Don't buy me toys, buy me a house,' " the young mother said.Colon, who became homeless late last year to escape domestic violence and multiple burglaries at her Bayview apartment, said she hopes to get into public housing before her time runs out in the shelter.Friedenbach said she has been trying to meet with the mayor for six weeks, just for a 30-minute conversation to discuss options for the homeless families, but she has been rebuffed.With a dozen or so homeless families behind her, she knocked on Lee's City Hall door on Tuesday to demand a meeting.Joaquin Torres, the mayor's director of Neighborhood Services, stepped outside Room 200, said the mayor was out, and offered to meet with the families instead - an offer they rejected.Torres declined to set up a meeting with the mayor, but said if they met with him, he could pass their concerns and their request on to Lee.After 15 minutes, Friedenbach and the families vowed to return, perhaps with tents.

An invisible problem -For too long, Friedenbach said, family homelessness has been an invisible problem exacerbated by an inability to accurately count how many there are. A recent city homeless count identified 95 families, well shy of reality.The school district's count is one of the most accurate, although it doesn't include children like Sofia who are in subsidized private schools or who aren't in school yet.All told, the homeless families comprise more than 5,000 parents and children, Friedenbach said."It's certainly not getting better," she said. "We could actually populate a small town with the number of homeless families in San Francisco."

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